Bringing your customers to life using personas
Personas are a great way of bringing your customers to life. They’re great for everyone from product designers to marketers and customer service teams. They help make huge audiences that appear homogeneous smaller and more manageable.
By creating personas you can help the business understand it’s customer base in greater detail. You can see commonalities and differences between customers. You can build clusters of customers that have common behaviours and values. Personas can be used to help guide product design, pricing strategy, marketing messages and much much more.
Below are some of our top tips for getting personas just right.
- Start with data
Avoid creating personas that are assumption based or just generalisations taken from your local population or your own personal experience. Sit down with your data analytics team and assess what segments they already have in place. Are there certain customer groups that spend more than others? Are there customers that behave differently across channels? Does the data tell an early story?
2. Design your template
Think about how you want to present your personas. You might want to use a traditional tool such as PowerPoint or maybe opt for making small vignettes and videos. Either way construct the content flow you want to cover. You’ll want to include basic information such as name, age, where they live together with their family situation and background.
You may want to add in content relating to their average day, media consumption and a little bit about their personal story. Depending on your business you may also want to include information illustrating their relationship with you, how they interact, what channels they use and their spending behaviour and power.
3. Fill in your template
Start pulling together your persona. Give them a name and start to populate the attributes you want to include. Avoid crowding the persona so it’s easy to read and digest. Make sure your personas all follow a common and consistent design so that they’re easy to compare.
4. Validate with real customers
Once you’ve got your ‘straw-man’ as it were, test it in the real world. It’s a good idea to run your personas past two groups of people. Employees and customers. With both groups ask if they recognise the personas you’ve designed. Ask customers whether they recognise themselves at all. Ask colleagues whether they’ve experienced interacting with any of these personas in the real world. Once you have your feedback re-design and adapt as required.
5. Publicise
Once your personas are ready bring them to everyone’s attention. Showcase them throughout the company. Use this as another way of validating your work. Get teams to workshop how they would use them in their everyday roles. Get marketing to plan advertising and messaging activity against each persona. See how pricing strategy teams would change their thinking when confronted with two very different personas.
Some important tips
Make sure they’re useable and based on data.
Without data you’re just making high level customer stories that won’t be used throughout the business.
Limit the number of personas you created.
Like segmentation it’s about identifying large groups that share common behaviours, characteristics and beliefs. Avoid the mistake of creating personas for every nuance within your customer base. In some cases it’s also worth creating personas for those customers you DON’T want to target. This helps the business and any partners to avoid targeting segments that are of little interest or value.
Create a short guide outlining how the personas might be used.
Developing these role based use cases will help people see the benefits and give them reasons to adopt and use. Employees need to become familiar with the concept.
Invite ‘in’ breathing personas
Consider recruiting customer representatives that can engage with the brand and that match your personas. For the ski brand it’s about bringing that young freestyle skier into the business to help those in design, marketing and strategy to engage with real users.
Remember personas should be updated continually.
If you’re launching a new service you might find that your personas are very different once you get a look at transaction and relationship data. Personas should never become static PDFs.
